Guide to Essential Movies, by Joe Leydon

I worked with Joe for two years at the San Francisco Examiner.
Though he worked from his Texas home, he was the senior critic in charge
of major films while I handled the independent releases and foreign
films. He has literally been at the movie game since before I was born,
reviewing In the Heat of the Night for his high school paper in
1967 (he still counts that film among his personal favorites). I learned
a lot from him, and now everyone else can too.

I'm definitely biased when it comes to Joe's work, and I even
provided a quote for his book jacket cover, so readers can take this
review with a grain of salt. Even so, I thoroughly enjoyed "Joe
Leydon's Guide to Essential Movies You Must See If You Read, Write About
or Make Movies," (Michael Wiese Productions, $24.95) and will not
think twice about recommending it to anyone who asks.

My quote reads: "Joe Leydon's breezy prose takes the
'school' out of film school and makes looking at these classics fun ­ which is
as it should be." I meant it, and I'm not sure how much further I can go.

I can, however, tell you about the book structure itself.
Joe's aim is to provide a basic grammar for film people, talking mostly about
the most influential and/or the most copied movies in history. For example,
anyone who reviewed Zhang Yimou's recent Hero
should have known that it copied the structure of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon,
as did Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run
and many others.

Rashomon is here in a
chapter called "Foreign Influences," along with Open City,
Seven Samurai, The 400 Blows and Day
for Night. Each entry provides a
full-length review, written in Joe's eminently readable style, plus
"specs," "subjects for further research," i.e. three films
that have been influenced by the film in question, plus a "lesson for
filmmakers," which usually tells the story of a working filmmaker and what
he or she learned in this capacity.

Other chapters look at musicals, silent films, Westerns,
crime films, sci-fi, action films and comedies. Alfred Hitchcock gets a chapter
all to himself, and another chapter focuses on "Americana," (i.e.
Frank Capra, Do the Right Thing, etc.)

Strangely enough, I'm still learning from Joe.
Even after writing about films professionally for eight years, this book
contains a film that I've never heard of, a war film called Guadalcanal
Diary. I guess this kind of work is never
done.